The Fat Woman's Joke (15 page)

“She was most unsympathetic about my writing,” he went on. “She didn't want me to write. She didn't want me to express myself. She didn't say much, but she exuded hostility into the air. I would wonder what she did want from me. She has some money of her own, you know.”

“Is that why you married her?”

“Certainly not.” He was shocked. “She was a very pretty, intelligent, cultivated girl from a good middle-class family. I don't know why she married me—my father was a non-commissioned officer in the Indian army; we had pretensions, but no style. She had style, but no pretensions. I thought myself very lucky. We were both at art school. We were both trying to escape from our backgrounds.”

“And did you?”

“I did. I don't know about Esther. There was too much money in her family. Anyone can escape from class. Money is a harder conditioning. I lived on hers for a time. She's never forgiven me. But why did she offer? She said I should stay at home and paint, and she'd pay the bills. I tried for a full year. And do you know what? I didn't paint a thing. We spent too much time drunk and in bed. The situation was too humiliating, you see, for either of us to be anything or anywhere else. It's a year I prefer to forget. Yet it was quite enjoyable, in its way. Then Peter was born and I went into advertising and we settled down. Yet although now I earn a lot of money she still believes that it's she who keeps me. She believes this not with her mind but with her feelings. That initial outrage on her femininity was too great. Yet she insisted, she insisted, that I rape her finer feelings. Why? You are a woman. Can you tell me?”

She felt so like crying at this simple statement of fact that she could not reply. He did not notice, but went on talking.

“I think that women are determined to suffer at the hands of men. They will manipulate every situation in the world to ensure that they are in the right and the man is in the wrong. Show me a wronged woman and I will show you a baffled man, who wants no more than to eat, sleep, make love and procreate, and can't understand what all the fuss is about. That's what I like about you.”

“What?” she asked in alarm.

“You don't suffer. Not really. You pretend to for the sake of appearances, but you are more like a man at heart. You take your pleasures simply and your relationships lightly.”

“Then I am afraid,” she said, bitterly, “that you are a homosexual at heart.” She put down her brush and sat with her head in her hands.

“Don't get upset. I intended it as a compliment, and it in no way offends me that you should level accusations of homosexuality at me, since it is so patently untrue. I am a simple, natural man, and you are very beautiful, and let us face it, very easy.”

“Why don't you just go home to your wife?”

“I shall, presently, when I am ready. I have just noticed that pipe on the mantelpiece. Does William the poet smoke a pipe?”

“Yes.”

“What a pretty domestic picture it makes in its arty kind of way. William on one side of the fire with his head full of words and you on the other with your head full of symbols. Uniting, no doubt, on the hearth-rug from time to time. A pity you don't have children. They might grow up to rule the world. But then, of course, William already has a wife, hasn't he, and prefers to have his children in wedlock. And I daresay maternity would slow you down in your headlong career through the marriages of other men.”

“You have no right to talk to me in such terms. I asked William to go the day I met you. What more do you want? What sort of person do you think I am?”

“An easy lay.” He spoke sullenly, and they were silent for a bit.

“I am glad you're jealous,” she said presently.

“I'm not jealous. Why should I be jealous? Just get that fucking pipe out of my sight. You shouldn't keep other people's phallic symbols on the mantelpiece.”

She broke the pipe in half and put it on the fire, and they were happy, after a fashion, for a while.

“Is the bulb growing yet?” he asked. He had bought her an expensive lily as a present. They had planted it together in a pot with some potting compost. She watered it lovingly but it showed no sign of green. The dull earth remained flat and undisturbed.

“No.”

“I'm afraid you forget to water it.”

“I don't forget. I water it faithfully, but nothing happens. I haven't got green fingers.”

“Neither have I. Esther has, or used to have. After she ran away she had the back garden concreted over. She said it was tidier.”

“Ran away?”

“Never mind. You can't hold against people the things they do when they're mad. I wish she hadn't done that to the garden. I like looking at flowers, even though they seem to wilt if I so much as touch them. Go on painting. I like to sit here while you paint. I wonder why Esther couldn't bear me to paint? She would never leave me alone. She was forever offering me cups of coffee and biscuits and delicious new dishes. It was hardly surprising I got nothing done. When I was writing my book I locked it away, but I left the key where she could find it. I wonder if she looked. I would write more and more extreme things, things that I knew would annoy her more than anything, to try and provoke her into taking some notice, but I don't know whether she ever looked. When it's published she'll have to take notice, won't she? She'll have to read it then. Other people will force her into it.”

“How could you bear to live all those years without love?”

“I never said I didn't love Esther,” he said in some alarm. “I do. I always have. She's part of my life. She's Peter's mother. The happiest time in my life was when Peter was a very little boy; we made our contacts with each other through him. A smile to each other above the tiny head—you know the sort of thing. But they were real smiles, you wouldn't know about that. Parenthood is a whole dimension of life which is meaningless to you.”

“You reproach me with having no children. But yet you wouldn't father a child on me. It's not fair.”

“Why do women always want things to be fair, I wonder. Nothing's fair. And I wasn't reproaching you, either. You have to be brave, mind you, to be a childless, husbandless woman. Women are only considered to exist through merit of their relationships. I admire you for being so brave.”

“It's very sad,” she said forlornly, “that I should like and admire you so much as a person, and that you should like and admire me, I sometimes think, only as a female body. I thought for a time you were a serious kind of man, who could appreciate all of me and not just a bit of me. I don't want to be wrong about you. Don't make me be. You have been tied down in this hideous marriage of yours for so long I don't think you know what you're doing any more, or thinking, or saying, or feeling. I want to save you. I want to rescue you.”

“I don't want to discuss my marriage with you, Susan. Why do you insist? It will do you no good and only upset us both.”

“Because you've got to. You can't go on like this, living with someone who doesn't appreciate you. You need to be encouraged and loved and admired, and all your wife does is stultify every natural wholesome feeling you've got, until you're so full of defenses, you're just not capable of feeling properly any more.”

“I don't know why you have such a high opinion of me. Esther, who knows me better, has a very different view. I am her tame, despicable ad-man.”

“But that's what she's tried to make you. She seeks to despise you.”

“And you don't?”

“No.”

“I wish I could believe it. I say terrible things to you sometimes. Why do you put up with it? Other women wouldn't.”

“You try to drive me away, I know, because then everything would be simple and easier for you. But it's not what you really want.”

“I want food,” he said. “I want pie and chips and ketchup, the kind of food we had when I was a little boy. I can't raise my sights above my stomach. I'm sorry. I know I should, but really I can't take anything seriously but food.”

“Stop trying to get out of it. You've got to make some kind of decision. It's important. It's the turning point of your life. Your last chance.”

“Come here,” he said, “body.”

Laying her on the bed he turned her unclothed body this way and that, and pumped her limbs here and there, penetrating every likely orifice that offered itself to his view. He slapped and bit her, pulled her breasts and tore her hair. It afforded no pleasure at all, and she suffered a mounting sense of shock and outrage. This was not what she had meant when she embarked upon her career of cheerful sexual freedom. She cried, which interested him, but he did not desist. She was half on the bed, half on the floor, while Alan paused, searching his memory for details of vaguely remembered adolescent reading, when William let himself into the room. They covered themselves, separately, with blankets, and Susan flung herself weeping into William's arms. He put her in a chair, unmoved, and stroked his neat beard.

“I left my pipe,” he said. “Where is it?”

“I threw it away,” she said. “I'm sorry. He made me. Oh, William, make him go away. He's being so horrible to me.”

“Good,” he said. “You had no right to get rid of my pipe. One way and another, you are no better than an animal. I am sorry I disturbed you at your antics. Pray continue. I am just going.”

“Oh, don't go away. Don't leave me with him. Why did you go away when I asked you to? I didn't really want you to. We were so happy together, weren't we? Please don't leave me. Not now.”

“You've never cared twopence for anyone in your entire life,” said William, “and I'll tell you something else. You're a lousy painter. Go back to your ad-man. You deserve each other. I hope you take better care of his property than you did of mine.” He nodded to Alan. “Good day.”

He left. Presently Alan laughed. Susan continued to weep.

“I'm sorry,” Alan said. “But really I feel much better. You have a marvelous body, did you know?”

“I don't care about my body,” she said. “What about me?”

“It's time you got married.”

She looked at him, instant hope mingling in her brain like instant coffee in boiling milk, but he shook his head at her and went back to his wife.

“Why do you bring me to life,” she cried out after him, “if only to kill me again?”

“It's terrible to be used like a pound of butter,” said Susan to Brenda, “because that's what he did. I won't go into details, you're too young, but he went all the way through the book of rules, bending me and him in every possible direction. What has love got to do with rules? Or position?”

“If you want to be loved,” said Brenda piously, “you have to love. If you had loved him enough, you wouldn't have minded. You would have been glad to have afforded him some pleasure.”

“It wasn't anything to do with pleasure or with sex. It was just all his miserable rage and hatred coming out; he was humiliating me on purpose.”

“Do you think he's like that with his wife?”

“I am afraid not, with her no doubt he is more then reverent. That makes it worse. I was prepared to take him seriously, and he was determined to treat me like a whore. If he had managed to have a decent relationship with me he might have been saved. Now he will have to be a dandruff shampoo man for the rest of his life. It's his loss, not mine. I learned about him in time. I shall never marry him. And it wasn't only what he did, it was what he said. In the morning his words still all over me, like thorns.”

“You still haven't told me what made you leave Alan,” Phyllis was saying to Esther at about the same time. Nausea held Esther like a rapist's arms. She still ate, on the principle that she might as well give in and enjoy it, but food in her mouth seemed fluffy, and her very words tasted disagreeable. Phyllis stood at the stove stewing apples for her friend, having a vague notion that stewed apples had therapeutic powers. “I can understand that when you go on a diet you would disturb all kinds of things you didn't know about, like shifting a heavy wardrobe and watching the little creatures scuffle away, and finding old beads and letters you'd forgotten about buried in the fluff. But wasn't being married to Alan something to cling to? I would have thought it was the one positive thing you had, being a wife. How could you ever know you were right to do such a thing?”

“I left Alan once before. That time it was easy. It was a positive act. I wanted sex, and life, and experience. I wanted things. I was young. I could hurt and destroy and not worry. I had excuses. This time it was different. I did it because the state I was in seemed intolerable, not because I hoped for anything better. And yes, it is true that this time I have been conscious of a sense of sin, not against Alan, but against the whole structure of society. It is a sin against Parent Teachers Associations and the Stock Exchange and the Town Hall and the Mental Welfare Association and the Law Courts—”

“Do you feel sicker, Esther? Should I call the doctor?”

“Not that destructive young man of yours, no—it was a willful sin against all those human organizations that stand between us and chaos, marriage being one of them. My mother was very shocked when she rang home and found me gone. She followed me down here.”

Esther's mother Sylvia Susan was small, neat, pretty and 65. She was flirtatious, and wore clothes so up-to-date that people, never having seen anything like them before, would stare after her in the street. Now she wore a gray denim smock with matching kerchief in her hair. Her legs were thin and knotted; Esther was able to look at her own with something approaching approval. She sat at the table biting her fingernails, which was something she only did when in her mother's company.

“I wish you wouldn't worry me so,” said Sylvia. “It is not fair of you. Am I not due for a little peace? Could I not be allowed, for once, the luxury of not worrying about you?”